Dynamic Engagement - Securing rapid approvals
We shall seek to secure all the paperwork within a three month period (excluding preparation time).
The problem varies from place to place, but typically, the time it takes to secure approvals to actually build a major subdivision project can take many months or even years. When this approval process is subject to analysis, reasons emerge why this happens. About 95% of the elapsed time is either down time, meaning nothing is happening (documents are sitting on a desk in the queue) or circular time, meaning an item has been returned to the applicant for an answer, which, when it is answered, gets placed at the bottom of the queue again.
The problem is further aggravated by the inherently conflicting goals of the applicant - pecuniary interest, with the job of the approver - assessing the effects to protecting the public interest from adverse effects. Against this backdrop, the typical rule changes required to permit a large development tend to be general, not specific, thus the approver must examine the proposed changes and try to anticipate how they could be interpreted in a way that pecuniary interest benefited by producing adverse effects.
In Dynamic Engagement, we take a completely different approach intended to eliminate down time and circular time, and to develop a site-specific plan in which "What You See Is What You Get". The working brief of the Village Organising Company includes effects-based planning.
The goal is to secure all consents, approvals and other paperwork in 3 months.
Engagement - In order to secure authenticity and character, the people who will live with the results, the future villagers, participate in the master planning of their plaza neighbourhood. In addition, concerned neighbours and other affected parties are invited to participate, to assure their concerns are clearly articulated before decisions are made. In this way, the public interest is directly represented. Further, the outcome of that master planning process is to specifically set out precisely where buildings, streets, plazas and all of the built environment will go. There is no sense in developing a general plan and then later coming back with the detail, and there is no such thing as a staged development. The 50 hectares will be set out, the plaza locations and connecting streets established, the plaza neighbourhood boundaries drawn, and then the plan developed. As much as possible, individuals will have identified what size and shape of home they wish to have built, and these are then set out on a 100:1 scale model derived from the official aerial photograph of the land. Assisting in this process will be master planning professions, architects, designers, engineers and other advisors retained for the purpose. What typically takes months, where professionals make plans, then meet with the client to see how well it is received, will take weeks, as the model makers cut 100:1 scale buildings and they are set out on an accurate model (including contours) of the site.
Dynamic Approval - While the villagers and their expert advisors work in setting out buildings, streets and activities, the approving authorities will be in the room. They will not be a part of the process - it would be inappropriate given their role - but they will be reviewing and assessing the effects of the details of the plan as they are set down. Since all the improvements will be within the village walls, where an urban environment will be built following certain givens (for example no building over three stories, except some four storey buildings around the Village Central Square) one would not expect too many design elements to encounter resistance. However, any that did would be identified immediately, and the official would declare what made it an offending proposal. A dialogue would then ensue to determine how to revise the design to secure approval. This sort of thing occurs in the present system, although it generally occurs after the matter has come before the court, and the judge orders the parties to sort out as many differences as they can. What we do is front-end that dialogue, and put it in a less contentious context. At the end of this process, the officials then do another in-room review, as some matters may not have been obvious at the time, but may require adjustment when the final, locked plan is completed.
Reduction - The locked 3D plan is then rendered into standard paperwork seeking zoning changes, subdivision and master plan consents. At this time, if any of the work is rejected by the officials, they would have some explaining to do, and should be under considerable pressure. The intent is to avoid the sort of situation where one set of officials approve something and then another set get involved and change the basis of evaluation.
Construction Consent - If 4,000 plus construction consents were submitted, even just reading them may take years. The parallel village proposes that about 25 master building plans will be developed from which almost all of the homes and workplaces will be built. It proposes to use a min-max basis where engineer-approved variations are included in the plan, so for example, window size and placement can be varied without requiring an amendment to the plan. The structural element of all buildings will use a single bulk material - Variable Density Concrete, thus the number of elements used in construction will be limited... for example, there will be no insulation specifications because the concrete inherently meets or exceeds the insulation code.
